Gravel Pit

The voice and times of Tom Waits.

When Waits was a teen-ager, he saw Bob Dylan perform. Like Dylan, Waits is big on characters, stories, and punch lines, and he favors images over confessions.Credit Photograph by Gilbert Ortiz

There is a cliché about Tom Waits, or, as he described it to me, an “oversimplification.” In his words, the received version is that he “growls about booze and gargles with nails and screws.” In keeping with this perception, an affectionate illustration called “Visible Tom Waits,” by the artist Jim Lockey, was posted on Tumblr about a month ago. Waits’s body, with fedora, is depicted in cross-section, like a scientific chart, with his brain tagged “Here be monsters,” his throat filled with sandpaper and “gravel & spiders,” and his lungs noted simply as the location of the furnace.

Waits’s new album, “Bad as Me,” his twenty-second, has plenty of stone gargling. It was made with a vast constellation of new and old friends, the most prominent of whom is an often overlooked collaborator, his wife, Kathleen Brennan, who has been writing songs with Waits since his album “Swordfishtrombones,” from 1983 (for which she was uncredited). “She responds to things like she’s in an opium dream. I’m more of a sticks-and-wire guy,” he said. (Much of what he says in conversation could, with little intervention, become lyrics.) “Bad as Me” also features the guitarist Marc Ribot, whom Waits called “the Lon Chaney of the guitar—there are so many voices he’s able to conjure,” and high-profile guests such as Flea and Keith Richards. Central to the album are Clint Maedgen and Ben Jaffe, reed and brass players from New Orleans’s Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who appear on many of the tracks.

Since his 1973 début, “Closing Time,” Waits has been part of a continuum that either predates or runs parallel to rock and roll. In the era of Elvis Presley, Waits preferred Gershwin; he also chose the piano over the guitar, and Mose Allison over Chuck Berry. In the beginning of his career, his work leaned toward the acoustic and the emotionally patient, averse to flash and speed. (Waits has talked about the difficulty of opening for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, trying to make his audience listen to a man with nothing but a piano and a voice.) Though it’s fruitful and appropriate to see Waits in the lineage of traditional songwriters, it’s also worth noting two experiences that Waits has cited in his development. In 1962, when he was thirteen years old, he saw James Brown perform, and two years later he saw Dylan. Of the latter, according to Barney Hoskyns, author of “Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits,” he said, “Here’s a guy like Dylan onstage with a stool and a glass of water, and he comes out and tells these great stories in his songs. It helped unlock the mystery of performance.”

Neither of these influences is unusual, and it is easier to spot the imprint of Kerouac, a debt that Waits doesn’t hide. But there is one significant sense in which both Brown and Dylan gave him a template. Brown was not a particularly personal songwriter, and for Dylan the pronoun “I” is a deep, dry canyon best observed from a distance: who knows who many of his characters are? Waits mentioned the “stories” in Dylan, not a sense of prophecy or vision. Waits is big on characters, stories, and punch lines. He is often portrayed as a late-night troubadour, but he avoids easy sentimentality by favoring images over confessions, and by privileging hidden artistic connections over the Taser of novelty. “If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs,” he told me. “Misunderstandings are really kind of an epidemic and acceptable. I think it’s about one thing, but someone else will say, ‘That song is kind of a rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “Repent, repent!” ’ I think that’s great.”

The rhino in hot pants is not an exaggeration. In the eighties, Waits moved away from a standard barroom setup and began investigating sounds that caused many reviewers to invoke the word “circus.” On “Swordfishtrombones,” Waits started working with a range of electric guitarists and horn players. Regular drum sets were complemented or replaced by bits of percussion that sounded like garbage cans being knocked together. What had been a 3 A.M. melancholy smear woke up and started to sound like an over-driven engine (appropriate for someone who came to greater prominence when the Eagles covered “Ol’ 55,” his ode to a Buick, in 1974). This aesthetic move gave Waits’s career a lopsided shape: he began as an acoustic throwback, and then lurched forward, toward a dystopian-future war zone made of angry electric guitars and junk-yard drum sets.

“Bad as Me” comes at a moment of conflict and change, which is a comfortable setting for Waits and his carnival. The present is a time when individual, personal pain is less interesting than it used to be; big-tent ideas are welcome, and a good sideshow doesn’t hurt.

“Talking at the Same Time” could be a modified outtake from “The Threepenny Opera.” The horns huff on the upbeat, sounding cowed, while Ribot’s guitar bends and wobbles with reverb; it takes several listens to realize that Waits’s version of Weill is slow and diffident ska. Sounding nothing like the Waits cliché, he sings in a cramped and tense falsetto, “Get a job, save your money, listen to Jane / everybody knows umbrellas will cost more in the rain / all the news is bad—is there any other kind? /and everybody’s talking at the same time / Well it’s hard times for some, for others it’s sweet / someone makes money when there’s blood in the street.” Radiohead might be more popular at Occupy Wall Street, but Waits has the song catalogue.

“Bad as Me” is a jubilant scrabble, and this is nowhere more evident than on “Hell Broke Luce,” the title of which Waits took from graffiti that he read had been scrawled on the walls of Alcatraz. The drum track seems to be stomping and clapping by Waits and the drummer, his son Casey, who are eventually joined by the sound of gunfire, which may be one concrete reference too far. Ribot, Richards, and Will Bernard set up a nasty three-man Maginot Line, playing curt and ugly guitar phrases. The narrator seems to be a veteran of war, and Waits gives the song his stereotypical Waits treatment, singing as though he had no vocal cords but plenty of nodes. The protagonist’s friends develop bad coughs and have their thumbs blown off, and the chorus revolves around the familiar martial chant: “Left, right, left.” Waits sings, “How is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess / got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk? / Hell broke luce / Hell broke luce / Left, right, left.”

In the past thirty years, Waits, as a songwriter, has tried to retain a sense of craft while finding musical settings that take his compositions out of some nostalgic tar pit. On “Bad as Me,” he sounds like someone who knows the history of pop and uses only the bits he needs to make the hybrid creature that will carry him to safety. “I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time,” he told me. “The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.” ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.